Microsoft’s new search engine: Bing, but no boom

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing excels at finding a good restaurant.

Unlike Google, which generally returns links to mere web sites, Bing crawls listings at review services like Yelp.com and CitySearch. It then summarizes the results and displays a scorecard for each, rating things like service, drinks, food, wait time, lunch offerings, and so on, all laid out in a neat comparative table.

Bing is also great at finding travel information. Activating the travel tab puts you in a full-service reservation system. From there you can book tickets and even get tips about when to buy to get the best price.

Wired.com was invited to test-drive the new search engine last week during its beta phase, under the old moniker, Kumo, and we discovered lots of little gems like these.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Bing.com to the public on Thursday, as expected, at the All Things D conference in San Diego. It will go live worldwide by June 3.

But if Microsoft has come up with a clear improvement over Live.com — the also-ran search portal that Bing replaces — it doesn’t quite go far enough to make us feel that it’s time to dump Google.

On the positive side, we discovered Bing does much more than search for relevant links. It retrieves and processes data, and renders it smartly. That makes finding a great restaurant or an airline ticket, a snap.

But the service is far from perfect. Beautiful data mash-ups coexist side-by-side with perplexing interface choices that make it hard to find the best features. Meanwhile, actual search results were inaccurate in some cases, and disappointing overall in the local search category, one of the areas in which Microsoft hopes to make its biggest splash.

Notable improvements in general searches include the addition of related searches based on semantic technology from PowerSet, a search company Microsoft purchased in 2008.

Microsoft’s main search box now features suggestions as you type, which is especially useful when typing a word whose spelling is unclear to you.

Bing also keeps track of your search history and displays it prominently. It’s easy to turn off, and since it’s always visible it’s easy to remember it’s on, unlike Google’s less obvious approach.

These are nice upgrades, but they are mostly small tweaks and tricks. The real magic is in the company’s new Local, Shopping and Travel pages.

Here Bing packs some real innovation, especially as it comes to synthesizing information and summarizing it. Unfortunately, Microsoft chose a confusing interface, and cluttered it with paid listings, and as a result, many people will have to search around just to discover they can search for this information at all.

For local search, typing something intuitive such as “sushi san francisco” returns a plain vanilla list of links and a map, which is not very interesting.

You can drill a lot deeper by clicking tiny “Local” and “More Listings” links. The latter takes you to a page where you can reorder results by rating, price, atmosphere, parking and whether a place accepts credit cards. That’s cool.

Unfortunately, the interface is confusing and you could easily miss this feature if you didn’t know to look for it.

Worse, the results for local searches were sometimes inaccurate and incomplete. Local search couldn’t find a number of popular dry cleaners in North Beach, San Francisco, nor could it correctly locate the city’s one and only In’N’Out Burger.

If local search is something of a letdown, Bing’s travel search is a clear winner that sets it far ahead of Yahoo and Google. In fact, it’s a full-on reservation search engine whose interface seems uncomfortably close to Kayak.com’s.

Once you are there, you’ll find a powerful multi-airline search engine, whose best feature is its price predictor which tells you whether you should wait to buy a ticket or purchase it immediately. That’s technology it bought when it snapped up FareCast.com.

Unfortunately, once again, it is not obvious how to access this feature. The search engine’s main box doesn’t guess that a query such as “SFO Heathrow” is likely an attempt to find a flight, so you’ll have to know to look for the travel link.

Bing’s shopping search is also a big step forward. At first glance it looks like any other shopping engine, returning results pages featuring price comparisons, with an emphasis on Microsoft’s CashBack service, where registered users get rebates.

But click on over to user review tab, and voila! Here you will find awesome and automatic computations of the features that users highlight or hate most in their reviews — a visual representation of research that would take users many minutes to figure out themselves. How much time could this save a compulsive, review-reading shopper? Hours.

With Bing, Microsoft has shown that it understands that different kinds of searches require different kinds of answers and interfaces. They’ve shown too they understand that a search is often only the beginning of a decision such as what Indian restaurant to try or what kind type and model of water filter is best.

Unfortunately, those realizations are too hidden and not well enough developed to make one want to switch over immediately.

There’s a glimmer of something better than a search engine here — call it an information portal. Bing’s not there yet, but it is pointing the way.

Edited by Michael Parsons

Comments

Im lookign forward to bign, I and im sure the rest off you agree live just sucks! It does look a little fussy though and will never find sites a well as google- but it could be a handly little tool if you arn't surching for sits, pics or vids. On thing thouhg what on earth is up with the seahorse and banans in the logo- to be honest the logo is as good as live!